THE WARSAW JEWS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 633, 17 August 1951, Page 12

THE WARSAW JEWS

THE STARS BEAR. WITNESS, by Bernard Hy aged Victor Gollancz. English price, HIS terrible book has a certain Old Testament quality. It is a narrative of oppression and massacre, the fate of the Warsaw Jews. If the language lacks the majesty of the Bible, the writer has the earnestness and faith of a prophet. Bernard Goldstein, the preface tells us, had a long record as a socialist opponent of the Tsars. He was a moving spirit in the General Jewish Socialist Labour Union, the "Bund," an important body in Poland where a tenth of the population, before 1939, was Jewish. When Poland was overwhelmed by thé Germans, the Bund came face to face with adversaries more formidable than Nicholas II. The Nazis herded the Jews of Warsaw into a "ghetto" created for the purpose. Soon the herding inwards, which had assembled half a million Jews in a

natrow compass, was reversed and the outward movement to the extermination camps began. When the ghetto population had fallen to about 40,000, those who remained, the most. able-bodied, whose labour had been worth most in the factories the Germans had been running in the area, who had long known the fate of their friends, elected to fight rather than go meekly to death. The ghetto was secretly developed as a forttess with underground bunkers stored with food as well as with arms. The last evacuation order in April, 1943, was fiercely resisted. The magnificent fighting spirit of these desperate men earned them the attention of German tanks and artillery which, during several weeks, slowly blasted the ghetto into a vast heap of rubble. Some hundreds escaped through sewers to fight again, most for the last time, in the 1944 Warsaw rising led by General Bor-Komorowski, which the advancing Russians were unable to support. Goldstein’s own life of hiding, full of hair’s-breadth escapes, the loss of friends, danger, hope and despair, is the theme of much of the book. His worst disillusionment was still to come. "Liberated" Poland was as anti-Semetic as the older. Also the Russian secret police kept a close hand upon all those who were not Communists. During the war they had executed the Socialists, Erlich and. Alter; Goldstein feared he would soon follow them and escaped, largely by impudence and luck, to Belgium and the free world. Perhaps the strangest reflection upon this chronicle off blood and misery is that it is not capitalism which is the major casualty in a liberated Communist democracy under the protection of the divine Stalin, but social democracy. Those moderate, idealistic, fair-minded men, historically so often the willing accomplices of revolution, are its first victims. Who runs may read.

David

Hall